Old DNA key to new rape charges

A man who was arrested this week after a DNA review linked him to the scene of two Sydney rapes more than 20 years ago was already serving time in jail for the sexual assaults of seven women, including two who were heavily pregnant at the time.

The 51-year-old man, who cannot be named, was arrested in Goulburn Correctional Centre on Tuesday and charged over the rape of two women in Wedderburn and Appin in Sydney's south-west in 1989.

DNA evidence had been taken from the scene of the two separate rapes 24 years ago, and frozen to preserve it.

Detectives recently re-analysed that DNA and allegedly matched it to the man, who was already in custody over the sexual assaults of seven women.

The former bricklayer had attacked those women in secluded parkland, including in Centennial Park in Sydney, between 1997 and 2004. Two of the women were seven months' pregnant and, in some of the assaults, he tied the women to trees and raped them.

Police said that in March of 1989, a 24-year-old woman was picked up by a man driving a car and taken to a bush clearing in Wedderburn, where she was bashed and sexually assaulted.

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In November of the same year, a 47-year-old woman was asleep in a caravan in Appin when a man broke in and threatened her with a knife before sexually assaulting her.

Both sexual assaults were reported to police at the time but, despite detectives conducting extensive investigations, no one was arrested.

However evidence taken from the scenes of the sexual assaults was kept by the Department of Health and submitted for a DNA review recently.

After receiving the results, detectives arrested a man at the Goulburn prison on Tuesday and charged him with four new counts of sexual assault.

In 2006, the man had been sentenced to 22 years' jail with another two years on parole for the attacks on seven women.

During his sentencing in 2006, the court heard he had raped four of the women in Centennial Park, one of whom had been walking there in the early morning, and the others he lured there with promises of money for sex or for a swimsuit photo shoot.

He took another victim, who was heavily pregnant, to the Royal National Park at Audley after luring her into his car for paid sex.

Once there, he took her by the throat and tied her to a tree, bit her and sexually assaulted her several times before raping her. He threatened to kill her if she told police.

The man had blamed his rapes of the women, six of whom were prostitutes, on the break-up of his marriage, but at least one attack occurred before the separation in 1997.

A psychiatrist told the court during the man's sentencing that the man was "possibly of high average intelligence" and was motivated more by a desire to humiliate and denigrate the women than by sexual urges.